Trying to find useful things to do with emerging technologies in open education

Dashboard Views as Data Source Directories: Open Data Communities

Publishing open data is one thing, reusing it quite another. Firstly, you’re faced with a discovery problem – finding a reliable source of the data you need. Secondly, you need to actually find a way of getting a copy of the data you need into the application or tool you want to use it with. Whilst playing around with the Open Data Communities Local Authority Dashboard, a recently launched user facing view over a wealth of Linked Data published by the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) on the OpenDataCommunities website (New PublishMyData Features: Parameterised and Named Queries), I noticed that they provide a link to the data source for each “fact” on the dashboard:

One of the ideas I keep returning to is that it should be possible to “View Source” on a chart or data report to see the route back, via a query, to the dataset from whence it came:

So it’s great to see the Local Authority Dashboard doing just this by exposing the SPARQL query used to return the data from the Open Data Communities datastore:

This is actually an example of a “Named Query” that the platform provides in the form of a parameterisd ‘shortcut’ URL – changing the authority name and/or service code allows you to use the same base URL pattern to get back finance data in this case relating to other authorities and/or service codes as required.

The query view is also editable, which means you can use exposed query as a basis for writing your own queries. Once customised, queries can be called programmatcially via a GET request of the form

Having access to the data in this form means we can then pull it into something like a Google Spreadsheets. For example, we can use the =importData(URL) formual to pull in CSV data from the linked query URL:

This ability to see the data, then get the data (or “See the data in context – then get the data you need”) is really powerful I think, and offers a way of providing direct access to data via a contextualised view fed from a trusted source.